Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 25 - Muscle Gain Checklist, How Many Calories, Protein, Sleep + More!

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

In this episode, Danny covers the nuts and bolts of setting up a muscle gain program (exactly what he does with his clients).This episode covers:How big of a calorie surplus to use.How much protein to eat.Training variables.Supplements.Sleep.Lifestyle considerations.Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING: I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE! Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Follow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!-----TIMESTAMPS:  Support the Show.

What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And today we're breaking down why it is that so many people, perhaps yourself included, struggle to gain significant muscle mass despite going to the gym multiple times a week and doing what they might think is the proper style, if you will, of eating. It's not uncommon for people to categorically fall into a hard gainer category, which is essentially just people who struggle to gain muscle, essentially, no matter what they do. I'm going to outline exactly what it is I do with my clients whose goal it is to build muscle, including going over some common myths, misconceptions, and even kind of breaking down some issues that seem to persist in the space despite the body of evidence, literature, both scientific and anecdotal that we have access to.

So first, let me start by saying this. You only make the gains you can recover from. Period. End of story. That's really, really important to hear. The reason I say that is this. A lot of lifters want to make gains so much that they're willing to train hours and hours and hours at a time in the gym. And while on the surface, that might seem like exactly the right thing to do to gain muscle, a lot of times it's not. Particularly for newer lifters or even hard gainers, you don't need tremendous amounts of volume. What you need is

tremendous amounts of adaptation. And the best way to do that is to ensure you have adequate recovery. So if you are somebody who's struggling to gain muscle and working out more than two hours a day or upwards of two hours a day for more than four times a week, and you're not gaining muscle with that heavy of a training stimulus, your recovery is way off base. And one of the best things you can do is actually bring that training volume down and train more intelligently. We'll talk all about this later, but that's the biggest thing I need to hammer is if you're training eight to 10 plus hours a week and not gaining muscle, some part of the recovery paradigm is disrupted, whether it's nutrition, sleep, many of the things

we're going to talk about today, but you might just be applying too much stress to the body through just continuously pounding your body with volume and time in the gym. So let's first dive into the number one thing you should probably have on your checklist if your goal is gaining muscle, and that is to eat in a mild calorie surplus. Now, I've said it on the podcast and on my Instagram and on social media, whether it was YouTube, many, many times, and that's that you can gain muscle in any calorie range, depending particularly on how long you have been training. If you take a new lifter who's never lifted before in their entire life,

and you just have them lift on a traditional strength training program with some basic progressive overload built in, they will gain a significant amount of tissue, essentially regardless of what they eat, if they get some amount of protein in. But the longer we train, the more we need to fine-tune our nutrition to make sure that things are as close to optimal as possible. And while eating at maintenance or even below with an adequate training stimulus might stimulate muscle tissue, I recommend my clients be in around a 200 to 500 calorie per day surplus. The surplus will ensure that you have adequate nutrition to offset the demands of heavy stressful training and the stressors of day-to-day life. The additional calories don't necessarily have to come exclusively from protein either, right?

That's something that I think is worth noting, and we'll get to that in a minute. A lot of times when people think, oh, I want to gain muscle, I just need to eat, you know, exponentially more protein. In fact, I would recommend that you get some of that surplus, particularly from carbohydrate, because carbohydrate is the fuel most of us will use to do lifts, unless we're, of course, like keto adapted or doing incredibly low rep ranges where we can use the ATP PC system, which is essentially stored creatine and phosphate. But most of us are going to need a lot of carbohydrate to do glycolytic work, to replete or replenish the glycogen that is used for training, and to offset that cortisol response from stressful training. Carbohydrate can do that indirectly via its ability to manipulate insulin. So it's a

tremendously good idea to have carbohydrate if your goal is building muscle. I would recommend even using the majority of those surplus calories to go towards carbohydrate and some towards protein. Now, before we move on, I think it's really important to outline that more of a surplus does not equate to more muscle gain. Muscle gain is a very, very slow process. And essentially, what it works like is what I would describe as a funnel. If you have a bottle, let's say it's a two liter bottle, like a big old Pepsi bottle that you would get for a party, and you're pouring sand into that funnel, okay? And your goal is to fill that bottle with sand, okay? You need to put sand in the funnel slowly so that it all goes in

the bottle. If you dump that funnel full of sand, a lot of it might overflow and go out the sides of the funnel, missing the bottle altogether. Let's use the analogy that the sand overflowing the funnel and falling all over the table or the ground is fat gain. But pouring a little bit of sand at a time into that funnel ensures we get as much of that into the bottle as possible. The bottle represents muscle gain. We might spill a little bit over here and there. It's inevitable. We can't get every grain of sand in the funnel. We're going to spill some. With every gaining phase, you're going to have some amount of associated fat gain. However, if we go slow and we are smart and we keep that surplus mild and small, it's very analogous to pouring the sand into the funnel slowly.

We're going to minimize excessive fat gain. And if we just dump it in there, right, at the end of the day, the funnel and the bottle can only fit so much sand. So understanding that no matter how much you dump on top of that funnel, there's a rate limiting factor that's occurring. You can only build so much muscle, right? It makes sense to go more slowly and not rush the process unnecessarily and incur fat gain, which I don't think any of us want to do beyond a point that perhaps it might be beneficial for training or sport performance if you play a position where you need to gain weight for something. But adding copious amounts of body fat is really on nobody's list of things to do. So let's move on to tip number two.

All right, so here's one that'll come as essentially little to no surprise to anybody who has been lifting. We've actually already mentioned it. But ensuring you are getting adequate protein. So tip number two, adequate dietary protein. Now, how much is really going to be dependent on what style of lifting you're doing and how much protein and fat you need in your diet to feel and function optimally. But we need about 0.6 to 1 grams per pound of body weight to optimize muscle protein synthesis. Muscle protein synthesis is a very fancy way of saying muscle growth, or particularly we need 0.6 to 1 grams per pound of body weight to keep the machinery inside of the body that stimulates muscle group going. If we give the body enough raw materials in the form of proteins that eventually get broken down into amino acids, we've got a chance to build some muscle. However, more protein isn't always better, right?

If we're trying to eat in a calorie surplus like 0.1, eating too much protein might make it hard to get the other nutrients, particularly the carbohydrate we need to train. Um, and another thing is living only on processed protein sources like food, uh, like, uh, shakes and bars instead of whole foods might leave you with some micronutrient deficiencies. So focus on getting around 0.6 to one gram of protein per pound of body weight from a variety of sources, particularly animal sources. If you don't have a problem with that, if your goal is to build muscle, if you want to use plant-based sources, be sure to, again, like I said, use a variety so that you can get a plethora of the different amino acids required to maximize health and human function. But we really want to hit those branch-chained amino acids, most specifically leucine, if the goal is building muscle. And

animal protein is really, really good for that. If we're going to do this in a plant-based manner, you'll need to eat a blend of various plant proteins to get those complete amino acid profiles. If you've ever heard the phrase, rice and beans is a complete protein, what that's referencing is you cannot get all of the essential amino acids you need from rice nor beans. However, if you eat those two in tandem, you can because they contain enough of the required amino acids on their own that when you add them together, you'll get that full spectrum. So for plant-based dieters who want to gain muscle, it's very important that you source your protein from a variety of options so that you can ensure, again, you're getting that full spectrum of amino acids that's so important, particularly leucine. Now, another tip I have, and I've given this one on the podcast before, but if your goal is building muscle, particularly focusing on nutrient timing with protein can be beneficial. And I'm not talking about like pre or post workout feedings. I think protein can be beneficial. And I'm not talking about like pre or post workout feedings. I think that can be important. I'm just simply talking about spacing

your protein out across the day so that you get enough at different meals. Now for women, I recommend 20 to 25 grams per meal. For men, I recommend 30 to 35 grams per meal as a ballpark slash benchmark to aim for at each meal as those are amounts of protein relative to average body mass for each of those genders that will turn on muscle protein synthesis. So you can get three to four feedings or meals of a protein source with a minimum of about 20 to 25 for women, minimum 30 to 35 for men, you're going to be freaking rock, rock solid. If you just hit the total amount of protein you need, you're going to be doing fine. step more and space that out so that each of those feedings has a little bit of space in between them and they're balanced maybe a couple hours apart, you're really going to be hitting and firing on all cylinders. So that's a small tip within getting enough protein, which is again, spacing it out accordingly so that you have an adequate feeding a few different times a day that can

really make a difference, okay? Tip number three for anyone looking to build muscle, you need to train in a manner that allows you to do all of the following. So all of the following must be present in your training if your goal is building muscle. Gradually achieve progressive overload, okay? You have to achieve some manner of progressive overload. You're going to gradually need to increase the training volume that you can recover from. This can take months. It can take years of training to do this. Think about the first time you went to the gym. If you did three sets of squats, you couldn't walk for a week. If you've been training for years, it might take you three

sets of squats just to be warmed up now. So we're going to gradually increase volume over time. We're not necessarily going to aim for progressing intensity, meaning weight on the bar and volume at the same time, but we are going to work to progress both over the course of your training career. We need to gradually train closer to failure as you become a more skilled trainee. Training at a higher proximity to failure is going to make sure that you get the most motor unit recruitment. You can apply adequate mechanical tension to tissue and muscle. That's very important, very important for muscle gain. And you can also ensure that you're creating some degree of muscular damage, which may in fact play a role. We can't do sissy little sets that aren't

very hard, right? You could literally summarize your training as I want to become more and more capable over time of doing more sets that are hard with more weight and potentially more reps over the course of the many years I do training. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook.

But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. The fourth thing you got to do, you need to do everything that I mentioned for a long, long time. You need to do it consistently and do it for a while. Next, do some freaking cardio, okay? Don't go for six mile runs. Don't go for three mile runs, but do enough of an aerobic warmup to keep your heart healthy, to keep your vascular system healthy, to be warmed up for your training. It's not too big of an ask. Just treat your body right. Do a little bit of aerobic work so you're at least a healthy organism and that should be solid. And lastly, make some time for mobility and core work. These are the two biggest

reasons I find that people have a hard time handling those higher training loads and intensities. So just do your due diligence. So again, just to go through all of that rapid fire, I find that people have a hard time handling those higher training loads and intensities. So just do your due diligence. So again, just to go through all of that rapid fire, aim for progressive overload always. Look to increase volume across your training career. If you can get to a skilled enough place as a lifter that you can train closer to failure safely, you should do that on a certain percentage of your sets. And you can obviously vary how many of those sets you take close to failure across your training block, your training week, your training month, whatever you may be doing. This is why I work with people. This is the help that they want from a coach, right? They want somebody to kind of ensure that they're following a program or a protocol that allows them to do all these things safely, which you might be surprised to find that even people who have been lifting for years do not do.

And then again, do this stuff for a long time and be patient. Building muscle naturally is not easy and it takes time. And then just take care of your body by doing a little bit of aerobic work for your overall health and do some mobility and core stuff. Tip number four, and this is a massive one, get enough sleep. Early in my training career, I'm going to tell you a little story. Early in my training career, I used to get up at 4 a.m. to go to the gym. When I was in high school, I had AP classes, the gym. When I was in high school, I had AP classes, which I was barely getting by on because I was a lazy, lazy, lazy student and I would procrastinate. I played sports and I was chasing girls around constantly. So a lot of my time in the mid-afternoon was spent, like I said,

either playing sports or chasing women around. And when you're in high school, you can get away with that. And you can actually get away with a lot of things when you're young and loaded with testosterone. But I was getting up at 4am every day to go to the gym before school and not getting adequate sleep. And if I could go back and fix anything about my training career, I would have fixed the habit of getting more sleep and training less, believe it or not. I believe I would have fixed the habit of getting more sleep and training less, believe it or not. I believe I would have had exponentially better results as a younger athlete, as a younger lifter, right? I started lifting later in high school, but I would have had better results if I've spent more time focusing on sleep. Because when we sleep, that's when we do the bulk of our recovery.

And we do a lot of things within our body that indirectly support muscle growth. Like we synthesize testosterone and growth hormone during our sleep, which are really, really important. And sleep has been so closely tied to stress management and body composition that I believe the mood and anxiety management effects that come with getting enough sleep can make it so that you have better workouts later in the day or whenever it is that you do get to the gym. You can be more focused. You can be less stressed. All of these things are really, really powerful and they can all be augmented very simply by just getting adequate sleep. So that's something to really, really focus on and do not take that one for granted at all. So, so far, guys, just to cover it up, remember, we want to aim for a mild calorie surplus. That's really,

really important. About 200 to 500 calories a day is what I recommend. That surplus should come primarily from carbohydrate and protein. Speaking of protein, the second tip is remember to get between 0.6 to 1 gram per pound of body weight. We need to train in a manner that allows for gradual increases in weight on the bar, volume, or proximity to failure. And be patient and get enough sleep. Moving on now to tip number five. Train in a variety of repetition ranges. So, what I mean by this. Don't always do sets of five, sets of ten, sets of fifteen, sets of twenty.

sets of 15, sets of 20. Vary your rep stimuli because there are different potential factors that manage and perhaps potentiate or help us build muscle. All of these factors are stimulated more or less at different rep ranges. So for example, metabolic stress. Metabolic stress is the accumulation of metabolites and different things within working tissue that can actually contribute to muscle growth. So hydrogen, creatine, and lactate that get built up from higher rep sets might be beneficial from time to time to potentially pull one of the various levers that impact muscle growth. Another one is mechanical tension. And mechanical tension is essentially just spreading out tension across our muscle tissues. And we can do that at a variety of rep ranges, simply training closer to failure with heavier weights.

But we might do best doing that at a lower rep range. So metabolic stress might be best at higher rep ranges with lower loads, and mechanical tensions might be better at moderate to lower repetitions with higher loads. The last piece is muscle damage. Muscle damage seems to play a role in some way, shape, or form in building muscle. And we can achieve a little bit more muscle damage by focusing on our tempo or increasing the time under tension. And our genetic response will get more to genetics in a minute, plays a role in how we respond to all of these stimuli.

So play with these things, be smart, change them from time to time, not all the time. And don't be afraid to see what works best for you. Again, this is something I spend a lot of time doing with as a coach. When people come to me, they're like, hey, I can't build muscle. This is what I do. And I see a lot of training that maybe only highlights metabolic stress. And I'm like, all right, we're bringing your volume down, your reps down and your intensity up. And now we're just going to see how that goes. And then all of a sudden, these people get really strong and they build a little bit of muscle. And they're like, how am I building muscle? I'm doing less volume. And I'm like, well, we're doing a little bit

better at applying mechanical tension. You're able to recover a little bit better because we're not training as much. We're training with more intensity and perhaps more proximity to failure. And we're potentially achieving more muscle damage perhaps more proximity to failure. And we're potentially achieving more muscle damage. So there's two things, two of those levers that we're pulling on that might be making a difference. On the flip side, I get a lot of clients that do a ton of low volume work. And when you expose them to moderate or high repetition ranges, all of a sudden they start seeing progress. So it's really important over time to vary the stimuli with

which you expose your body to, but you need to progress in those different repetition ranges as you would any other rep range. You still need to apply some detenant of progressive overload. Training novelty can be impactful, but only for a limited time. So if you are going to incorporate these things from time to time, that's great. But if you want to get the best results, you should in some way, shape, or form apply progressive overload. All right, tip number six, respect your genetics, okay? I hate to break it to you, but not all of us have Mr. Olympia caliber muscle building genetics. We might just be very average. If you're lucky, you'll be a little bit more muscular than what your parents look like. So just respect what your genetic capability is. Be positive and optimistic while remaining pragmatic about what it is you can

accomplish. And certainly don't beat yourself up because you have quote unquote bad genetics. I have yet to meet somebody with quote unquote bad enough genetics that they couldn't build a physique they were proud of. Allow me to rephrase that or say that one more time rather. I've yet to meet a person who no matter how crappy, shitty, suboptimal their genetics were, could not work to build a physique that they were proud of. Could they build a physique that they admired when they first started lifting? Perhaps not. But can they build a physique that can do a lot of amazing things and that they're proud of? Yes. A big one also, try not to compare yourself to other people. You have no idea what their genetic background may be, what their training background might be.

And oftentimes with social media, we catch people on what I would like to call their best day, their best look, their best lift. And then we see that and we go, man, I'm a fucking puss because maybe I had my worst day, my worst lift or my worst look. And then I open my phone and I see that and I immediately compare myself. I've done this myself. A lot of people do this. So again, this is a big tip for anybody looking to build muscle. You want to build muscle to be healthy, strong, fit, and capable, to be the best version of yourself, not a better version of somebody else, okay? Or an equivalent or cloned version of somebody else. You want to be the best version of you. And that's what a coach is going to do. They're going to help you bring the best version of yourself out of this while minimizing, hopefully minimizing, all of this comparison bias and giving you the support you need and the space you need

to really develop as an individual. That's what a resistance training journey is all about. Whether you're a powerlifter, bodybuilder, Olympic weightlifter, fitness enthusiast, CrossFitter, somebody who wants to get better, it's all about personal improvement and personal development through challenging yourself and being honest about what it is you can accomplish and not using genetics as an excuse, just using them as a litmus test to say, hey, this is what I can accomplish. This is about what I could probably shoot for. I don't want to, again, let myself down, but I don't want to limit myself either. So be realistic, but optimistic. All right. And the

last piece is just manage your stress. All right. Tons and tons and tons of extraneous stress is not good for muscle because it's not good for health. So manage your stress, get outside, enjoy your life, enjoy your friends, enjoy your relationship. What good is a great physique if you can't find balance and people to spend your time with. Seriously, if you're so obsessed with building muscle that you can't go out and enjoy time with friends, loved ones, and family, then you are going to be setting yourself back simply by not having balance and having those extra stressors. So again, just to wrap things up, everyone, one last time, ensure you're eating in a mild calorie surplus. Eat adequate protein. Train in a manner that

allows for progressive overload, increased volume, and increased proximity to failure over time. Get about seven to nine hours of sleep, train in a variety of rep ranges across your training career, respect your genetics, and manage your stress. That's it, guys. That is a 25 or so minute long rundown of exactly the framework I work with clients on if they're looking to build muscle. If you found any value in this episode, please feel free to share it to your Instagram story and tag me. I'd love to talk to you about what you like, didn't like, or any questions that you had. And if you like this framework and you would like the assistance of a coach to take you through it, support you through it, and again, give you the education, engagement,

and of course, enthusiasm required to really conquer what might seem like a daunting goal of gaining muscle, feel free to apply for coaching at www.coachdannymatranga.com under the coaching tab. But if you just want some free resources, there's a ton on the website there for this as well. Perhaps download the Training and Nutrition Fundamentals eBooks. Those have a ton of information, and I believe there's over 50 pages of free information just in those two eBooks. So

thanks so much for listening, guys. Have a great day. Be safe out there. Hopefully we get back to some degree of normalcy soon. But in the meantime, do the best you can with what you've got. You'll be so happy you did when this is all said and done. Have a good one.